Exogamy and civic processes: An incentive or disincentive for Sub-Saharan African women?

The Sub-Saharan African region remains one of the regions with the lowest rate of women's representation in the legislative process. With the exception of Rwanda and South Africa, which can boast a 61.25% and 46.5% presence of women in their national parliaments, respectively, most African countries still struggle to raise the bar beyond the regular. Nigeria and the Benin Republic remain among the lowest, with about 3.61% and 7.41% of women in their parliaments, respectively. The implication of this is that a small percentage of women are involved in the process of formulating laws or policies that will address dangerous cultural practices, socio-economic inequality, child marriage, lack of access to qualitative education, gender-based violence, female mutilation, restricted political participation, and exclusion from public life, among other phenomena that directly affect or are related to the female gender in Africa.Previous studies have identified cultural, economic, socio-political, and religious factors as the underlying factors, with little or no empirical studies on the effect of exogamous marriage on the inclusion of women in the parliamentary process. Thus, the study adopted a country-based comparative cross-sectional study to examine the extent to which marriage outside the culture of female parliamentarian candidates influences their success.